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It is estimated that childcare issues result in a $1.36 billion dollar loss annually for Utah’s economy. Family-Friendly Workplaces: A Guide for Utah Business Leaders is a resource guide for business, government and community leaders that spotlights valuable data, what to consider, and actionable steps with best practices for businesses to elevate the culture and leadership around child care support. We encourage you to carefully review the guide, and consider what steps you can take in your organization to support the child care needs and overall well-being and success of your employees.
Understand the Needs of Your Working Parents
Your working parents will be your most valuable partners in your journey to find solutions that directly benefit them and your organization at the same time.
Find Your Partners and Learn the Landscape
You are not alone. Existing resources and community partners can provide expertise and information to guide you.
Go For Some Quick Wins and Then Build on Them
Take small steps and get quick wins to generate momentum and enthusiasm for meeting this complex challenge.
Cultivate Strong Leadership to Support an Elevated Culture
Have internal champions, ideally, high-level executives, lead the effort to promote child care benefits and options in the organization. Provide these internal champions the ability to cultivate new ideas. You may be surprised by how supporting working parents may also improve productivity and increase loyalty among all employees. Meaningful and positive change will be most successful if it comes from the top down. It is also important to have representation from different divisions and maybe even Employee Resource Groups to ensure the needs of all employees are considered.
Creating a culture where employees feel supported and cared about has to begin with all levels of leadership within the organization. Culture change is a long-term process, so it may take years for an organization to see meaningful gains. We encourage you to not give up too quickly as the investment is very likely to prove profitable.
Making the Most of Existing Child Care Realities
1. Set Standard Start and End Times for Meetings
Some organizations have implemented a policy that no meetings will start prior to 9:30 a.m. or end later than 4:30 p.m. This simple move cuts down on the anxiety surrounding timely day care pickup and drop-off, and the expense related to day care overtime charges. When parents aren’t worried about running late, they can keep their mental energies focused on the business.
2. Make Schedules Predictable
Whenever possible, making schedules predictable and avoiding telling employees at the last minute that they need to stay late, come in early, or travel on short notice can reduce stress, build trust, and enhance efficiency. This also allows employees to plan their outside-of-work responsibilities around work commitments more effectively.
3. Offer Flexibility
Allow employees to set schedules that work for them by providing flexibility about the hours they work and the location they will be working from. Ask employees to put their availability (time in and out) onto their calendars and set the expectation that colleagues schedule meetings around those hours. Invest in conference room technology so team members can dial in to any meeting from anywhere, especially if scheduled earlier or later than usual.
How Employers Can Assist Their Employees with Child Care Options
1. Research Existing Child Care Options in the Community and Provide a Child Care Directory for Employees
Many states have existing child care networks or associations for the education of young children. Contact the organizations that specialize in child care in your state to help identify different types of quality care in your community. Be sure to include traditional child care centers and child care homes, non-profit and faith-based providers, and Head Start and Early Head Start programs for eligible families.
2. Contract with a Third-Party Company to Assist Employees in Connecting with Child Care Providers.
A third-party company can facilitate an array of services that will bolster benefits packages and provide substantive assistance to employees in addressing dependent care needs. Examples of third-party intermediaries include KinderCare, Care.com, TOOTRiS, and WeeCare.
These services can be activated with as little as two hours’ notice and can prove to be an outstanding benefit to your team.
A third-party company can:
3. Offer a Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account (DCFSA)
Employers can offer a Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account (DCFSA) — a pre-tax benefit account used to pay for eligible dependent care services. Make sure child care expenses are included in your benefit policies and provide training during employee onboarding or after a life-change event so they understand how to use these accounts for significant savings.
4. Provide On-Site or Local Child Care Spaces and Supervision
Black and Hispanic families are more likely to live in child care deserts with few options before the coronavirus pandemic struck. A 2021 survey of working parents, conducted by Harvard Business Review, found that the loss of hours due to lack of child care thus far in the pandemic is greater for women of color, women without a college degree, and women living in low-income households — groups which lost nine or more hours per week and who were more likely to be working in essential industries that require in-person work.
When back-up child care was available to these vulnerable populations, they lost fewer hours of work per week during the pandemic. Employers who can pool together to offer quality on-site or local child care options for employees will see more productive and loyal employees. As mothers, the mere idea of being able to bring our children to work and know they are well cared for, safe, and engaged, would be a game-changer.19
Child care can be expensive and hard for working parents to navigate, even in the best of circumstances. Smart, compassionate companies help their employees through this minefield, recognizing that it could be the benefit that matters most for employee retention. Policies and programs can help with the practicalities of care and express an authentic desire to do well by your company’s working parents.
Here are four approaches for parents to consider, either individually or as a group of families.
1. Keep Your Pod
During the height of the pandemic, when many of us still had demanding jobs and children needing care and schooling and no social outlets, we turned to the concept of “pods” — one or two families that we could safely socialize with, share meal prep with, and swap child care with. For many, they felt natural because they are natural: They were a mini version of our existing village.
As you think about back up care, keep this mentality around with one change: keep it just as intentional (clearly communicating expectations and needs) but not nearly as rigid (exclusively considering one family to suffice for all needs). Consider expanding your pod to include multiple families for different needs, including socializing, meal help, and last minute child care assistance. For each family, have a conversation around the mutual help that would be great to give and get and what it might look like.
For example, you can choose to do communal meals on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, where on Tuesdays and Thursdays, one family makes dinner and delivers it to the other, and on Fridays, everyone eats together. You can choose to swap child care each weekend morning — each family gets 8 a.m. to noon and swaps on the other day. This is also an option for the tricky after-school slot where families can rotate caring for all the children in the 3–6 p.m. time frame. There are many ways to structure the mutually helpful, rotating blocks of care. The key is to identify what each family needs and come to a communal agreement within your pod.
2. Find People With the Same Patterns as Your Life
Another option is to look at your family’s schedule in the fall and find people that match parts of that schedule. For example, think of families that go to the same school and share pick-up and drop-off times, are on the same soccer team, or go to the same day care. Get to know three or four of these families and consider making a back up pact with them. This looks like saying, “Hey, my fall work schedule has me going into the office on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. In case I’m running late or something comes up on those days, would you be open to taking Cara and Chris to school or bringing them home?
I’d be able to do the same for you, especially on Mondays and Fridays. The kids have booster seats they’d be able to bring.” This is especially useful if you find yourself not able to make it to soccer pick-up on time or need to deal with one sick kid but still need the other child to get to school. In these cases, you’ll have a ready-to-go set of people you can call.
Keep in mind that you’ll want to be comfortable with how the other family will provide care for your children — car seats, driving rules, etc. — and vice versa. The key is clear over communication and upfront, mutually agreed upon expectations to minimize or lessen issues down the road.
3. Build Your Professional Back Up Bench
This was the go-to option for many of us pre-pandemic — a network of sitters, nannies, and teachers that we had on call as paid, professional back up. It takes time and care to build up this bench. You have to proactively find, interview, and manage them, but you get the benefit of a trusted professional that can swoop in and do just what you need.
The first step is to reach out to anyone you used to have on your “bench” and see if they’re still available and willing to help for a specific set of times. It could be a standing weekly time, a flexible number of hours each week, or the ability to be on-call in times of last-minute hiccups.
Depending on how many existing relationships you’re able to resurrect, you may need to add a few new people using the usual avenues — asking around, posting on parent/neighborhood forums, and using child care-focused services.
Think about having at least two to three sitters on your bench, more if you’ll be asking them for last-minute needs. The deeper your bench, the more likely you’ll be able to get help when you need it. Also, reach out to your employer to see if they have options they’ve brought on. Over the pandemic, caregiving has risen to the top of employee needs, and workplaces everywhere have expanded the support they’re providing. This could look like on-site options to subsidize child care.
4. Be Your Own Back Up (When Necessary)
There is only so much we parents can do to manage the unpredictability of our home lives. So as much as we can do to build our networks to step in in times of need, we also need to turn our attention the other way, toward appropriately setting the expectations of our employers. After these 15+ months, employers should deeply understand the context in which the work gets done — and that the context is complicated.
Another option to consider is to let your manager know that, although you have created a robust plan to deal with unexpected circumstances, there are going to be times when you’ll need (or want) to be the back up. And in those times, they should expect that you’ll be taking meetings from home, with a little one in the background, or you’ll be shuffling meetings to get individual work done on those days. After all, you’ve proven you can do it during the pandemic.
The two years have pushed parents to the very limits of our resilience and resourcefulness. But there are important lessons and adaptations from our pandemic experiences that we can take and bring forward into the next phase — continuing to create and build robust social structures that help us weather the ups and downs of parenthood. And if we start with a realistic picture of what we need, and build up the right bench for us, the transition to yet another chapter will feel uncomfortable but doable.
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